Know your patient.

Most books that provide advice to medical students are unified on this aspect: know your patient.  Know them as well as a neighbor or a friend.  Know them better than their doctor's, your preceptors, know them.  Know their kids' names, parents' names, and whether or not they have any pets.  Maybe even find out what their favorite color is.  Ok, favorite color was my own addition, but you get the idea.  The fact is that our instructors last year gave us the same advice.  Know your patient.  

I have continued to think about this charge that we have been given.  I have been working to know my patients as well as I can, and I have made many inroads in this direction.  But I keep coming to this idea that knowing our patients is extremely important to the practice of medicine.  We must know their complaint, and the history of the illness.  We must know their entire past medical history and no detail is too small, really (unless it's a multivitamin, perhaps, but even then that can be important).  Their medications, their allergies (even hay fever), their history of surgeries, their habits...  We must know it all.  We must know it all so that we can practice accurate medicine - provide the right medications, the right operations, and the right recommendations and counsel. 

But what really strikes me about this is how willing my patients are to discuss any aspect of all of this with me.  I realize that the patients simply want to get better and this desire drives much of this.  I don't know what accounts for the rest, but I hypothesize that it's the white coat, or perhaps the stethoscope I carry.  Maybe it's the nametag, or simply the idea that anyone who introduces themself as a student and begins asking the right questions should receive this kind of deference - the voluntary submission of information.  Whatever the source, it amazes me that my patients are so forthcoming and that these relationships - knowing our patients as well as we need - is relatively easy to do.